Archive
The paper that came with the games, and the advertising that sold them.
Catalogue, 1986
A covering letter signed by Brian Betts, a sheet for Dark Planet, and a fold-out of the range. Games were $25.00 on tape and $26.00 on disk, with a “buy two — get one free” offer running to 28 February 1986.
In the press, 1982
The earliest dated notice of the company found so far: a page of product write-ups placed by The Australian Beginning, the Melbourne online service, in Australian Personal Computer, September 1982. Mountain Valley shares it with Peach microcomputers, the Casio FX 9000P and a 3M teleprinter.
It is worth reading closely. Mountain Valley is called “one of Australia’s newest and most dynamic software companies”, writing for the TRS-80 and the System 80 — the Dick Smith clone sold here — and the range is not only adventures: it lists Superterm, a dumb terminal program, and a test and grading program for schools. Nothing else in this archive records those two. The programs sold through the Electronic Shopping facility of The Australian Beginning and over the counter at Computer Country.
Advertising
The October 1984 page promises “eight magical worlds” plus The Gambler, bills Himalayan Odyssey as a new release, and prices the range at $26.95 on tape and $28.95 on disk. December’s extends the same two-for-one offer to Christmas and carries the Boronia order form. The third is the Spectravideo 328 launch advert for M&M Software.
The October and Spectravideo pages are from PC Games. The December advert also ran there, on page 12, but the copy shown here is a later and much better scan that was trimmed to the advert’s own border, so it carries no masthead of its own.
Reviewed, 1985
Four of the adventures reviewed together in Commodore Magazine, volume 5 number 6, across pages 14 and 15. The page notes that its prices “were compiled in the latter half of 1985”. Mountain Valley is set alongside Level 9 and Scott Adams — company Betts would have been pleased with — and called “a true Australian adventure manufacturer” with “over eight graphic adventure games” out for the Commodore 64, at $27 on tape and $29 on disk.
The reviewer rates The Lost City 85%, King Solomon’s Mines 82%, and Castle of Mydor and Mystery Island 80% each, singles out the three-part screen as “the neatest screen presentation ever seen in adventure games”, and notes that every one of them is written in BASIC. The two reviews that stood on this site from 2007 were transcribed from this page, without its ratings; this is the page itself.
Playing the games
Fifteen original disk images survive and each is linked from its
game’s page under “From the archive”. They are plain .d64
files: open one in VICE, which
is free for Windows, macOS and Linux, or copy it to a THEC64.
There is one further disk image on this site that is not an original: a present-day conversion of the 1981 TRS-80 game The Secret of Flagstone Manor to Commodore 64 BASIC, offered on its own page and labelled there. Mountain Valley never released that title for the Commodore 64.
Hint sheets
Mountain Valley sold a hint sheet for each adventure. Ten survive, and each one is linked from its game’s page under “From the archive”. They contain solutions — open them only if you mean to.